To a superficial observer, so wonderful a regularity may be admired as the
effect of either chance or design; but a skillful algebraist immediately concludes
it to be the work of necessity. (David Hume)

Here we go again. More than 200
years after Hume's (1779) devastating critique of the argument from design,
somebody else is trying to mathematically demonstrate the impossibility of natural
explanations for the order of the universe, and of biological evolution in particular.
To be sure, William A. Dembski's book explicitly talks about evolution in only
one section spanning a mere seven pages, and quoting only one evolutionist,
Richard Dawkins. However, the book has been hailed (e.g., in the endorsements
assembled here)
as a revolutionary contribution to design theory (the latest incarnation of
"creation science"). Furthermore, it is soon to be followed by a more
explicit attack by Dembski on evolution, Uncommon Descent, which "seeks
to reestablish the legitimacy and fruitfulness of design within biology"
(click here).

What is the "design inference,"
and why, as evolutionists and scientists, should we care about the concept?
The answer to the first question: a mix of trivial probability theory and nonsensical
inferences. The answer to the second one: this book is part of a large, well-planned
movement whose objective, I contend, is nothing less than the destruction of
modern science and its substitution with a religious system of belief. Let me
briefly explain both claims.

The basic tenet of Dembski's
book is that there are three possible explanations for any observed set of events:
regularity, chance, and design. Regularity describes such phenomena as
the rising and setting of the sun. Chance is most simply exemplified
by the outcomes of tossing a fair coin. Design can be found--according to Dembski--in
biological evolution, cryptography, plagiarism, and the suspicious doings of
one Democratic election commissioner in New Jersey named Nicholas Caputo (more
on him later). Dembski then proposes what he calls an "explanatory filter"
to determine which explanation correctly accounts for any particular phenomenon.
The filter works by successive exclusion: if something is not a "regular"
natural phenomenon, it may be chance or design. If it is not the former, it
must be the latter. This kind of reasoning is, of course, quite trivial, and
it was worked out in probability theory well before the appearance of this book.
As Dembski himself acknowledges, the statistician Andrei Kolmogorov had all
the pieces of the puzzle in place by 1965.

But never mind that. If Dembski
had simply defined "design" as what in biology is known as "necessity"
(Monod 1971), his book would have reduced to another case of somebody reinventing
the wheel. Instead, he goes much further, asserting that "in practice,
to infer design is not simply to eliminate regularity and chance, but to detect
the activity of an intelligent agent" (p. 62). This claim is what turns
his opus from triviality to nonsense.

Although Dembski cloaks his logic
with semi-obscure (and totally useless in practice) pseudo-mathematical jargon
and symbolism, the essence of his argument is easy to understand. It is best
exemplified by his own treatment of the above-mentioned New Jersey election
commissioner. Nicholas Caputo, nicknamed "the man with the golden arm,"
was charged with electoral fraud because in 41 elections he oversaw, 40 had
seen the Democrats at the top of the ballot and only one had the Republicans
placed first. The probability of this occurring by chance in the random drawings
that Caputo claimed to have conducted is less than one in 50 billion. Regardless
of the odds, however, the New Jersey Supreme Court did not convict Caputo because,
after all, even very unlikely events can occur by chance. In the absence of
additional evidence, the Court simply ordered Caputo to change the way in which
the drawings were conducted to avoid "further loss of public confidence
in the integrity of the electoral process." (Who says that jurists have
no sense of humor?)

Dembski--as would anyone else
with a bit of common sense and an elementary understanding of probability theory--concludes
that the Court indeed had enough evidence to convict. Why? Because additional
information available at the time--that is, that there is an advantage in being
first on a ballot and that Caputo was a Democrat--clearly pointed to design,
not chance. In other words, chance can be discarded as a reasonable alternative
if two conditions hold: the probability of an event is very small, and the information
available about that event allows someone to specify a particular pattern in
advance. To put it even more simply, the following sequences from flipping a
coin, TTHTTHTHHT and HHHHHHHHHH, have exactly the same probability of occurrence.
However, your suspicion that the first one is genuinely random, whereas I created
the second by simply typing the letters on a keyboard, would indeed be correct.

An important component of Dembski's
argument is what he calls "probabilistic resources." Because the design
inference is established on two pillars--the occurrence of a specifiable ("detachable,"
in the author's jargon) pattern and a small probability of occurrence--Dembski
is faced with the problem of how small such a probability actually has to be
before chance can be ruled out. Instead of relying on the commonly understood
limitation of statistical theory, which recognizes that any probability level
is arbitrary and, therefore, that answers in science are only tentative and
always subject to revision, Dembski wants more, much more. He submits that there
is an absolute probability level that can be used as a universal yardstick for
inferring design: 1/2 x 10-150. How did he get there? By estimating
that there are 1080 particles in the universe, that no transition
between physical states is possible at a rate faster than 10-45 seconds
(the well-known Planck time), and that the universe is not likely to exist for
a total of more than 1025 years. 1080 x 1045
x 1025 is indeed 10150. The 1/2 multiplier in front of
the probability expression is to insure that our chances of reaching the correct
conclusion are better than one in two (a rather arbitrary number in and of itself,
of course). The basic idea here is powerful: if Dembski can demonstrate that
the probability of a molecule of DNA forming in the primordial soup approaches
what he calls this "universal small probability," then life did not
evolve by chance.

Too bad he missed the solution
to this riddle, which has been proposed several times during the last few centuries,
most prominently (and in various fashions) by Hume (1779), Darwin (1859), and
Jacques Monod (1971). According to these thinkers, if a given phenomenon occurs
with low probability and also conforms to a pre-specified pattern, then there
are two possible conclusions: intelligent design (this concept is synonymous
with human intervention) or necessity, which can be caused by a nonrandom, deterministic
force such as natural selection. Caputo's doing was the result of (fraudulent)
human design; biological evolution is the result of random phenomena (mutation
or recombination, among other processes) and deterministic phenomena (natural
selection). It is disheartening to see how many people don't seem to be able
to understand or accept this simple and beautiful conclusion.

More than disheartening is the
background into which Dembski's book falls. In fact, I find it rather maddening.
I will list a few pieces of additional information and then let the reader decide
if I am justified in inferring a conspiracy behind this book. Dembski's book
is endorsed on the back cover by two people from the same universities where
he matriculated. The inside cover comes with a bold hail by David Berlinski,
who represented the creationist side in a recent PBS debate on evolution versus
creation. And Dembski's list of acknowledgments reads like a "Who's Who"
of the neocreationist movement, including Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson, and
Alvin Plantinga. According to the book, Dembski is "a Fellow of the Discovery
Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture" (CRSC). A bit
scarce as an academic reference, no? The reason may be that the Discovery Institute
(www.discovery. org/crsc/index.html) is a conservative public policy think tank
with the declared intent of promoting the intelligent design theory as "a
scientific research program" that "has implications for culture, politics,
and the humanities, just as materialist science has such implications."
A document called "The Wedge," which has been associated with the
CRSC, has recently been circulated on the Internet (humanist.net/skeptical/wedge.html).
The Wedge amounts to a detailed plan for insinuating intelligent design and
other creationist ideas in the public as well as the academic arenas, with the
ultimate goal of overthrowing the current scientific establishment and establishing
a theistic science. Dembski's book can be seen as part of one of the steps of
the Wedge strategy.

Unfortunately, Cambridge University
Press has offered a respectable platform for Dembski to mount his attack on
"materialist science"--which, of course, includes evolution. My hope
is that scientists will not dismiss this book as just another craze originating
in the intellectual backwaters of America. Neocreationism should be a call to
arms for the science community. The battle is already raging, and scientists
and educators are still not sure if they should even bother paying attention.

References cited

Darwin C. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Reprint, New York: A. L. Burt, 1910.